Domain Adaptation for Semantic Parsing

Recently, semantic parsing has attracted much attention in the community. Although many neural modeling efforts have greatly improved the performance, it still suffers from the data scarcity issue. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic parser for domain adaptation, where we have much fewer annotated data in the target domain compared to the source domain. Our semantic parser benefits from a two-stage coarse-to-fine framework, thus can provide different and accurate treatments for the two stages, i.e., focusing on domain invariant and domain specific information, respectively. In the coarse stage, our novel domain discrimination component and domain relevance attention encourage the model to learn transferable domain general structures. In the fine stage, the model is guided to concentrate on domain related details. Experiments on a benchmark dataset show that our method consistently outperforms several popular domain adaptation strategies. Additionally, we show that our model can well exploit limited target data to capture the difference between the source and target domain, even when the target domain has far fewer training instances.